I've started reading the first of my recently ordered poetry collections - Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 

Also waiting to come in the post is:

Sea Room: An Island Life - a biographical book about a young man, Adam Nicolson, who inherited the Shiants, a group of uninhabited Hebridean islands beween Skye and Harris. I've been wanting to read this book for a long time.

Darkness Spoken - The collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Unfortunately, it Was Paradise - Selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish

I really enjoy reading European poetry, my favourite poet last year was the wonderful German poet, Durs Grunbein. When I'm going on holiday I like to read up on some poetry from the place I'm going, the last two books should give you a clue about where I'm going in October! :)

Having just about recovered from the mad rush of StAnza, here's a list of my purchases:

The Mermaid and the Sailors by Claire Askew, the young dynamic Edinburgh-based poet. It's her debut pamphlet and I have to say I love her cover pic.

An Illustrated Book About Birds by Anna Davis, exactly what it says on the tin and the illustrations are brilliant

The Water Table by Philip Gross, a T.S. Eliot winner

The Hat by Selima Hill, a book of rather surreal short poems 

Incense by Claire Crowther, a pamphlet sequence of Fatras

Ashes for Breakfast, Selected poems of Durs Grunbein, translated by Michael Hofmann

Needless to say my five-poets-only reading plan has been dropped for the time being. However I have resisted (nearly) every temptation to reach for the beloved  poets and I intend still keep away from them. I'll be resorting to my big five when I'm through the other poetries but I'll also be adding Durs Grunbein and Claire Crowther (who I'd been reading anyway) to the list.

Books, books, books...

I'm a slow poetry book reader, it takes me months and longer to digest a collection, re-reading it, thinking on the poems, letting them work on me consciously and unconsciously.
As well as many other books, I've been thinking on Robin Robertson's collection The Wrecking Light and Phillis Levin's May Day over the last while. I've also been reading Songs the Lightning Sang, a pamphlet by Geoff Cooper. Pages of online poetry that I have on my favourites bar at the moment are Plath (saves digging the book out all the time!), D H Lawrence, and Baudelaire.

Next month is birthday month and these are the books on my hit list: -
Identity Parade the controversial new anthology from Bloodaxe of new British and Irish poets
Plath's Ariel - the one with the poems in the order Plath intended, I've been meaning to get it for ages.
A Les Murray collection, there are so many that I haven't decided which one to go for.
The Wild Iris by American poet Louise Gluck
Blood Wedding and Yerma, two plays by Lorca
Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
The Return by Eleanor Cooke
The gorgeous looking Venti, a poetry pamphlet by JoAnne MacKay
The also gorgeous looking collection The Lost Garden by Hugh MacMillan
And some more pamphlet poetry which I haven't picked out yet.
That's all, I think...